d&t Holiday Cards!

We’ve been sending out holiday cards to our friends and families for a few years now. Last year, we letterpress printed these fun tree cards with lyrics of Joy to the World as a field of text. We loved this cards but wanted something even more playful and whimsical this year. After searching pinterest, we were inspired by the simple ‘chalkboard’ messages that that we found–like here and here. This was also a great opportunity to practice my script lettering.

So after several drafts in my sketchbook, we both decided on this version here with a ribbon banner above. This simplicity of the front is paired with a really fun pattern on the back…and a shameless but subtle plug for the studio; gotta get that branding in there somewhere. But why are they seafoam green you ask? My husband and I debated a lot over colors. We both agreed that we didn’t want the traditional red and green. Instead, we took a modern spin on colors and used  seafoam and warm gray for the card itself. Then we brought in a rainbow of fun colors with the envelope liner. Then these colors from the liner show up again on our newsletter tags, helping to unify the palette.

The whole card assembly is tied together with pink baker’s twine and stuffed in a kraft brown envelope. Each envelope is then lovingly hand addressed and finished off with a return address label and O’Henry stamp (don’t you love how the post office loves seafoam green too).

The cards turned out great this year and we love how “us” they are.  And just in case you need a recap, here’s a breakdown of all the pieces:

1. Hand drawn/lettered card

2. Newsletter tags capturing our top 3 moments of the year strung on baker’s twine

3. Kraft brown envelopes with liners (we cut these from sheets of mr. boddington’s wrapping paper)

4. Seafoam green wrapped return address label

5. O Henry postage stamp to match our favorite seafoam green!

Keeping the Post Office in business

Finally finished assembling, addressing, stamping, sealing…
Dropping these babies off in the mailbox this afternoon!

Sneak Peak…Family Newsletter

If your family is anything like mine, then you are well aware of dad in the office typing up the yearly family newsletter as an insert for christmas cards. When I was younger, I sat at my dad’s feet listening to the click click click of the typewriter…yes, we owned a typewriter. And then at some point, we started printing out the newsletters from our computers…and then it turned to virtual letters via email. The family newsletters stopped being published sometime when I was in college–and I kind of miss them.

We loved the idea of bringing back that tradition to our new family (currently just me, my hubs, and the pup). I’m not much of a writer myself, but as my husband can attest to, I’m a wannabe storyteller. Neither of us wanted to write my dad’s traditional version of a newsletter, so instead, we decided to include 3 snapshots of the top highlights from 2012. This way, we could help our friends and family feel like they were a part of our story. And as the idiom goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

To assemble the tags to the cards, we strung them with baker’s twine and wrapped it around the card just like a sweet little holiday present!

With instagram being all the rage these days (I’m addicted and can’t stay away), we cropped these 3 highlights from the year in instagram fashion and applied a few antique filters through lightroom to maximize the effect. And on the back of each photo, we’ve included a short description and date for each moment. It was actually very amusing when we were picking out our top 3. Everything we picked seemed to have happened in the last 3 months of the year. Maybe it’s just short term memory, but we didn’t want it to seem like we didn’t have any fun until September, so we had to dig through our memory bank to figure out something fun that we did pre-summer!

You’ll have to read our next post to get the scoop on the color choices. They seem random now, but make much more sense when you see the complete package. Stay tuned for more holiday card action, and enjoy the sneak peak!

The Holidays are coming!

Can you believe it is already DECEMBER? Where has the year gone?

Thanksgiving was a bit early this year and it seems like I’m still catching up from the whirlwind of traveling we did that week. Yep, we hit all 3 corners of the state in 3 consecutive days and gorged ourselves on turkey, stuffing, pies, etc. On the drive home from thanksgiving festivities, I blasted Christmas music on the radio the whole way! I don’t know about you, but I look forward to hearing Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ on the radio every year (I mean every time I tune in to our local station).

So we returned home and I cued up my Christmas mix CD (I made it in 2002 when CDs were still cool) and got cranking in the studio designing a few different holiday cards. We chose to have these cards flat printed at our local print shop to make them more affordable to our clientele. What’s great about this printing option is that you can totally customize you colors and text before we print them.

Here are just two examples of orders we’ve already printed and shipped out!